I'm thrilled to finally be able to offer my spooky crime thriller Book of Shadows as an e book in the U.S., just $3.99 on Kindle:
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And for the reading phenomenon known as Sample Sunday, here are the first two chapters of the book.
Chapter One
September 22
It was a vision of hell.
A dismally foggy day over stinking heaps of refuse—a city
landfill, the current euphemism for an old-fashioned dump. Caterpillar trucks
and front-loaders crouched with metal jaws gaping, like gigantic prehistoric
insects on the mountains of trash, an appalling chaos of rotting vegetables,
discarded appliances, filthy clothing, rusted cans, mildewed paper: the
terribly random refuse of a consumer society gone mad. A lone office chair sat
on the top of on one hill, empty and waiting, its black lines stark against the
fog.
And below it, tangled in the trash like a broken doll, was
the body of a teenaged girl.
Stiffened…naked…bloody stumps at her neck and wrist where
her head and hand used to be.
Homicide detectives Adam Garrett and Carl Landauer stood on
the trash hill: Garrett, with his Black Irish eyes and hair and temper,
hard-muscled, impatient, edgy; and chain-smoking, whisky-drinking, donut-eating
Landauer, a living, breathing amalgam of every cop cliché known to man:
middle-aged spread, broad sweating face, and bawdy, cynical humor—a lifer who
used the caricature as a disguise. The partners were silent, each taking in the
totality of the scene. The landfill was a succession of hills and pits and
carefully leveled ground; rutted roads wound up the hills to the fresh dumping
mound on which they now stood. A strong, cold wind whipped at their coats and
hair, swirling plastic carrier bags across the trash hills like ghost
tumbleweeds and mercifully diffusing the stench. On a hot day the smell would
have been beyond bearing.
On one side of the summit a forest stretched below,
startlingly green and pure against the chaos of human waste. On the other side
the city of Boston was a hazy outline, like a translucent Oz in the bluish fog.
Far below at ground level were smaller hills of gravel, sand, broken chunks of
concrete, logs and stumps, wood chips, various earthy colors of mulch, a black
pile of tires. A corrugated tin roof sheltered an open-walled recycling center.
A row of BPD cruisers lined the dirt drive up to the
landfill’s main office trailer. The temporary command post had been set up
beside the trailer, and two dozen mostly African-American and Latino workers
huddled beside it, waiting to give statements to a couple of uniforms, while
other patrolmen walked the periphery of the fence. A long line of city
sanitation trucks was stalled at the front gate, being diverted by traffic
control. The first responders had done their best to establish a perimeter,
considering the crime scene was a joke: how do you begin to process a mountain
of refuse a hundred yards high?
Landauer looked over the reeking heaps of garbage, shook his
head gloomily. “Shit.” He spat the word. “I don’t know if he’s the smartest
perp I’ve ever seen or the dumbest.”
Garrett nodded, keeping his breathing even, trying not to
suck in too deep a lungful of the sulfurous stink. Smartest—because any trace
evidence would be completely lost in the junk heap. Dumbest—because the unsub
must have driven straight in past the office trailer and paid the attendant for
the privilege of dumping his terrible cargo. Garrett lit a mental candle,
half-thought something like a prayer. Please let there be a record.
The partners turned away from the dismal panorama and
climbed over trash to where Medical Examiner George Edwards, a stocky Irish
banty rooster of a man, stood looking down at the body. Seagulls circled
sullenly high above, their breakfast taken from them.
Two crime scene techs were extracting and bagging one piece
of garbage at a time from around the corpse, meticulously preserving as much
evidence as possible in the hope that the refuse in which she lay might yield
some personal connection to the killer. A videographer documented the original
placement of each piece. All three technicians stood and moved back in solemn
simultaneity so Garrett and Landauer could approach.
It was Saturday, which meant Garrett was the lead on the
case. Department protocol was that partners alternated leads, but Garrett and
Landauer had found through long experience that if they took regular days of
the week and flipped for Sundays, it all evened out anyway. Garrett nodded to
Dr. Edwards and crouched beside the body.
The girl was as stiff as a Barbie doll, still half-buried
and splayed on her stomach; a handless arm, a curve of buttock, one leg visible
in the bed of trash. Garrett’s face tightened as he stared down at the jagged
red stump of the neck, the gleaming white nubs of cartilage, the black stream
of ants swarming over the gaping wound. The gulls had also been at it. But
there was shockingly little blood; none at all on the trash below the severed
neck and very little congealed around the stump. A small blessing: the
decapitation had occurred after she was dead.
Garrett pulled a micro-recorder from his suit coat pocket
and clicked it on. “Killed elsewhere and dumped,” he said aloud. “Decapitation
was post-mortem.” Above him, the M.E. grunted affirmation, before Garrett
continued, “Head and hands probably removed to prevent identification.” It
happened more often that anyone would want to think.
Garrett studied the visible arm and leg. Despite a
fashionable slenderness and gym-enhanced muscle tone the girl’s limbs were
rounded, and silky smooth, the heartbreaking plumpness of baby fat. Garrett
felt hot and cold flashes of anger. He spoke aloud, biting off the words.
“Eighteen, nineteen years old. Twenty-five at the most, but
I doubt it.”
Landauer shifted behind him grimly. “Yep.”
Garrett swallowed his fury and continued his visual
inspection. He was fighting his assumptions, fighting to keep his mind clear. A
naked girl on a trash heap; so often these miserable victims were prostitutes.
Sex killers notoriously trolled highways and rough neighborhoods for these
easy, anonymous targets. But there was not that sense about this one.
Okay, why?
He looked her over, looking for the facts. He gently used a
latex-gloved hand to lift a stiffened forearm. No track marks, no cuts or
bruising, no ligature marks—although telltale abrasions might have been cut off
with the hand. “No defensive marks, and it doesn’t look like she was bound.” Someone
she knew? Or just someone with
the element of surprise?
Garrett was about to set the arm down, then noticed a trail
of six black dots along the partially exposed shoulder, about the diameter of a
pencil eraser. Hard, smooth, shiny, irregular…
Scabs?
He used a fingernail to dislodge one of the drops and
examined it on his thumb, held out the dot to Landauer, then Edwards. “Wax, I
think.”
“Black wax? Kinky.” Landauer commented.
Garrett nodded to a tech, who crouched with an evidence bag
to take samples of the dots.
Garrett turned his gaze to the exposed leg—not just smooth,
but hairless—a salon wax, and fresh pedicure. The skin was healthy and
blemish-free.
This was not a runaway, not a heroin addict, not a
prostitute.
“Not a hooker,” Garrett muttered.
“Not any I could afford,” Landauer agreed.
Garrett stood, and the detectives watched as the techs
resumed clearing the trash around the body like archeologists uncovering an
ancient skeleton, painstakingly removing trash one piece at a time, placing
beer bottles, fast food wrappers, orange rinds, a stained lampshade, into
various sizes of labeled paper evidence bags. Garrett turned to the medical
examiner.
“What do you say, Doc?”
“Livor mortis is fixed and she’s in full rigor. I’ll have to
wait for the vitreous potassium tests to confirm, but given the temperature I’d
put the time of death at no more than twelve to sixteen hours.”
The techs cleared several more pieces of refuse to reveal
her back. Between her shoulder blades there was a single stab wound, in the
vicinity of the heart. The slit was narrow and practically bloodless.
“Could be the fatal wound.” Edwards said, neutrally. The
photographer clicked off photos.
Garrett’s attention was suddenly drawn to the right arm,
still mostly buried. “Look at that.” He crouched beside the body again, lifted
a wet clump of coffee filter and grounds so the other men could see. The right
hand was still attached to the right arm, intact.
The detectives looked at each other. “He takes the left hand
but not the right?” Landauer said, perplexed. “S’up with that?”
Garrett stood to let the techs back in. “Maybe he was
interrupted. Didn’t get to finish.” But it sounded wrong as soon as he said it
aloud.
With enough trash now removed from around her, the techs
rolled the stiffened body onto its back.
“Holy shit.” Garrett heard Landauer breathe out behind him,
as all the men stared down.
There were dark streaks of blood on her thighs, and the
sight was a sick stab, though hardly unexpected.
The true shock was higher, in the pale flesh of the girl’s
chest.
Someone had carved into the torso with a knife, cruel red
slashes against the young skin: the number 333 and a strange design, three
triangles with the points touching.
Looking down at the crude slashes, Garrett felt his stomach
roil with apprehension, even as his investigative mind registered details. No
bleeding from the cuts; they were done post mortem. So why the looseness in his bowels, the tightness in his scalp, the
overwhelming impulse of fight or flight?
Landauer was speaking, the hoarseness in his voice hinting
that he was struggling with a similar reaction. His eyes were fixed on the
bloody carvings. “That s’posed to be satanic?”
Garrett found his own voice, tried to breathe through the
constriction in his throat. “Or someone trying to make it look that way.”
“Three-three-three?” Landauer blustered, some of his panache
returning. “The fuck is that? The Devil Lite? Satan can’t count? I say someone’s
messin’ with us.”
Garrett stood slowly, an anvil in the pit of his stomach. It
didn’t feel like a game. Not at all.
The three men, and the techs behind them, stood looking down
at the girl’s corpse, puzzling over the design. The three triangles were
maddeningly familiar, and ominous. Garrett was fighting a creeping dread, a
feeling of imminent danger. All of the men had moved slightly back from the
body. Garrett realized what he was thinking at the moment that the M.E. spoke
it.
“Radiation,” Edwards said suddenly.
The three crime-scene techs drew back, more noticeably this
time.
“That’s it. The radiation symbol,” Landauer said, his voice
thin.
“It’s not exactly, though. There’s something different about
it. The fallout shelter symbol?” The M.E. frowned, thinking.
“Do you think she’s hot?” Landauer said. For once the morbid
double entendre was completely unconscious. The wind gusted around them. All
the men shifted slightly, uneasily.
“I don’t think so,” Garrett said, only half aware that he
spoke. The whole damn thing is weird enough already.
“I doubt it,” Edwards agreed. “I’ll call HazMat, but I don’t
see any burns or inflammation.”
Radiation or not, this was a bad one. And the acid feeling
in Garrett’s gut told him it was going to get worse.
Chapter Two
The men split up to do other work until a Hazardous
Materials team could arrive to take readings. The detectives left the crime
scene techs behind to walk the grid, and unhappy uniforms to start the odious
process of sorting through refuse looking for the missing head and hand. An
exercise in futility, Garrett was sure, but it had to be done.
Landauer lumbered down toward the trailer set on blocks that
served as the landfill’s office to question the attendants, lighting up a Camel
nonfilter as he went.
Garrett shouldered the backpack he carried at crime scenes,
filled with the bags and flags and miscellany of evidence-gathering, and took
off in the opposite direction, along the road, walking the curve the killer
must have driven to access the dump site. The road was gutted and gouged, a
bitch to drive even in a heavy truck. On one side there was only the flimsiest
of fences between Garrett and a sheer drop to the valley below, thick with
green trees. On the other side of the road, gripping the hill, was a wide
shoulder of startlingly luxuriant weeds. There had been a full week of rain
just days before and now ferns and grasses and golden black-eyed Susans and
feathery white Queen Anne’s Lace rippled in the wind, which still carried a
surprising chill—a fall day with the underbite of winter.
Garrett shivered slightly, found he was wishing for a
cigarette himself. The carvings in the body disturbed him. Ritualistic elements
almost always meant multiple killings. And if he really analyzed his feelings
about it, there was an unease that went deeper, back to childhood, to the huge
and dark mysteries of the masses that were an unquestioned part of his early
years, the enforced service as an altar boy.
But along with the disquiet there was a thrill: the strong
sense that this was a big case, huge, maybe the case that cops dream about, with all the mediagenic elements that made
careers. Along with the shifting uncomfortable memories, Garrett felt the stir
of ambition.
He stopped at a turnout to look out over the entire dump,
the consecutive hills of refuse. The property was circled in fencing, and
patrolmen had already been all around the perimeter; nothing had been cut,
making it likely that the killer had driven straight in through the gated
entrance to dump her.
Why would he risk it?
Why not dump her out in the forest somewhere?
He. Another
assumption. But the chances of a woman doing this to another woman were
microscopic.
Garrett took in the scene again, and couldn’t help feeling
that the unsub had chosen the setting deliberately, had reveled in the filth
and chaos and ungodly waste; had sought the ugliness like a civilized person
seeks beauty.
He turned back toward the road and was startled by movement
in the sand right in front of him. A horned beetle the size of his kneecap was
creeping across the road, shiny black carapace gleaming. Garrett felt a shudder
of revulsion, moved sharply aside to avoid the thing.
As he circled the creature at a good distance, he eyes were
drawn to a bare patch in the green shoulder beside him. He moved closer to the
clump of weeds, staring over the small field.
There were irregular oval brown marks in the wild grass, the
size of footprints. The wildflowers around the marks were shriveled and
blackened, as if by fire. Through his initial confusion, Garrett thought
immediately and oddly of the three triangles.
Could it really be? Radiation?
What in God’s name would make footprints like that?
A feeling of dread rose up through him, from his legs
through his groin and spine, up to the top of his head. The hair was standing
up on his scalp and arms.
He gasped in, sucking breath, inhaling a rotten egg smell…
Sulfur.
He wheeled in place, staring around him.
Nothing but piles of gravel and crushed concrete, tangled
heaps of rebar.
After a long moment he turned back to the dead flowers. He
fumbled his digital camera from his backpack and snapped a few shots, then took
a plastic evidence bag from a side pocket of the bag and broke off several of
the burned flowers, slipping them into the plastic sheath. He stepped back and
scanned the dirt road. It was criss-crossed with tire tracks, an amorphous
mess, but he pulled a handful of colored flags from the pack and flagged the
brown scorch marks in the grass, and the multiple tire marks in the sand of the
road.
On his way back toward the body, he stopped a tech beside
the parked crime scene unit van and pointed out the flags he’d placed. “Get
impressions of the treads in that area. And there are some burn marks in the
grass—get some photos of those, too.”
Landauer met him on the road, his big face flushed red with
heat despite the chill, and sucking smoke from probably his fifteenth Camel of
the day. “See no evil, speak no evil,” he grumbled, exhaling and jerking a
thumb back down the road toward the office trailer. He lit a second cigarette
from the one he had burning, carefully dropping the butt into a metal Band-Aid
box he carried around at crime scenes for that precise purpose. “These bozos
don’t record names or plates, just vehicle size and classification of load. ‘Sanitation
Truck, Pick-Up, Trailer, Truck, Dump Trailer.’ ‘Refuse, Stumps and Brush,
Concrete, Rebar, Dirt/Asphalt, Brick.’ The attendant doesn’t even leave the
trailer—just eyeballs the load through the window, weighs the truck on the in
and out, and collects the cash. Next time I got a body to dump, I’m a comin’
here too.”
“How many customers today?”
Landauer grimaced. “They average 2,250 a day.”
Garrett’s heart sank. “So this morning…”
“Over nine hundred by noon. Got a patrolman getting Closed
Mouth Mary to write down every make, model and color she can remember, but we’re
not talking rocket scientist here. And yeah, she collected a few checks, but it’s
mostly a cash business. I don’t think we’ll be pulling devil-boy’s name and
coordinates off one of those stubs.”
The big detective paused, puffed in smoke. “There is
something, though.” He exhaled a noxious cloud and nodded up the trash mountain
in the direction of the body. The sun was sinking in the sky, throwing long
shadows over the hills. “That whole area was scheduled to be capped this
morning. They bulldoze dumploads of dirt, cover it up, level it off.” He
indicated a high heap of dirt on the flat road above the trash pit. “Thing is,
this morning the front-loader broke down, threw the schedule off.” He pointed
to the gigantic vehicle next to the pit.
“So she would have been completely covered if there hadn’t
been that glitch,” Garrett said slowly. She wasn’t meant to be found. And
that means carving the numbers and symbol was a private ritual, not done for
anyone else to see.
“He’s familiar with the operation and schedule of this
particular landfill, then,” he said aloud with cautious excitement. “A worker,
or landscaper or contractor.”
“That’s the best case,” Landauer nodded. “The catch is, a
lot of these loads that get emptied are from Dumpsters that get picked up all
over the city. Someone coulda just tossed her in the nearest one of those, it
gets picked up, and she gets dumped out with the rest of the trash. The
Dumpster trucks back up to the pit and are emptied hydraulically, so the driver
wouldn’t even see what he was dumping.”
Garrett fought a wave of disappointment. “What about the guy
who found her?”
“Worker who came up to repair the dozer.”
Garrett’s eyes immediately traced the distance between the
bulldozer and the body far below. A hundred yards, minimum.
Landauer watched him calculating.
“Guy’s got good eyes,” Garrett said slowly.
“Says he saw seagulls fighting over something.” Landauer
offered, his voice flat.
Garrett glanced at his partner sharply. “You don’t believe
him?” In fact the gulls were still circling above, hoping to return to their
interrupted meal.
Landauer spat. His face was neutral. “Guy’s skittish, is
all.”
Garrett found the mechanic in the office trailer. He sat in
front of a raggedy corkboard bristling with invoices and flyers, his hands
tearing apart a whitefoam coffee cup a precise quarter inch at a time. He was
short and built like a bull, with dark copper skin and an Aztec nose. He
hunched in the metal folding chair as if trying to disappear into it.
Garrett’s Spanish was serviceable, but the bilingual version
of Severo’s story was identical to what Landauer had related in English.
Landauer was right, though; the Mexican was decidedly jumpy—eyes shifting
around the room, sweating profusely even in the cold of the underheated
trailer.
“Tienes calor?”
Garrett asked. Are you hot? The
lone space heater was on the other side of the room; Garrett couldn’t feel any
heat coming from it at all.
“Poco,” the mechanic
said, and his eyes shifted away again. His fingers found the cross at his neck.
“You seem nervous.”
Garrett remarked in Spanish.
The mechanic half-shrugged. “It is a terrible thing,” he answered.
“It is,” Garrett
agreed. Una infamia.” An
outrage. It was one of the first Spanish
words he’d learned on the street and it seemed to express what he felt better
than any English word that existed.
“Pero—es todo?”
Garrett pressed. Is that all? The
mechanic dropped his eyes. Garrett looked at the litter of white chips at the
man’s feet. “I think you are afraid.”
Garrett challenged.
The mechanic stiffened, but said nothing.
“Porque?” Garrett
demanded. Why?
The mechanic glanced toward the screened front window, in
the direction of the trash hill. The sun was a bloody crimson ball on the
horizon.
“Bruja,” he mumbled,
and Garrett’s flesh rippled again.
Witch.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homicide detective Adam Garrett is already a rising star in the Boston police department when he and his cynical partner, Carl Landauer, catch a horrifying case that could make their careers: the ritualistic murder of a wealthy college girl that appears to have Satanic elements.
The partners make a quick arrest when all evidence points to another student, a troubled musician in a Goth band who was either dating or stalking the murdered girl. But Garrett’s case is turned upside down when beautiful, mysterious Tanith Cabarrus, a practicing witch from nearby Salem, walks into the homicide bureau and insists that the real perpetrator is still at large. Tanith claims to have had psychic visions that the killer has ritually sacrificed other teenagers in his attempts to summon a powerful, ancient demon.
All Garrett's beliefs about the nature of reality will be tested as he is forced to team up with a woman he is fiercely attracted to but cannot trust, in a race to uncover a psychotic killer before he strikes again.
“A wonderfully dark thriller with amazing is-it-isn't-it suspense all the way to the end. Highly recommended.” ---Lee Child
"Compelling, frightening and exceptionally well-written, Book of Shadows is destined to become another hit for acclaimed horror and suspense writer Sokoloff. The incredibly tense plot and mysterious characters will keep readers up late at night, jumping at every sound, and turning the pages until they've devoured the book." --- Romantic Times Book Reviews, 4 1/2 stars
"Sokoloff successfully melds a classic murder-mystery/whodunit with supernatural occult undertones." --- Library Journal
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6 comments:
I love Book of Shadows! You've woven the police procedural and the paranormal elements together seamlessly.
Some Wiccan beliefs make sense to me. Some don't. I tend to take what I need and leave the rest.
It always pleases me that Book of Shadows worked for you, Sarah. I think you're going to love my new one, Huntress Moon.
I'm much more of a witch than a Wiccan. The trouble with any belief system is that it can turn too restrictive too fast. Universality is the key, for me.
Great and informative post, Alex.
My experience of witches, Wicca and Satanism has been more philosophical rather than experiental. By that I mean I went through a phase where I did a lot of reading around spirituality and different belief systems some years ago, which included some heavy and thought-provoking material. It was a solitary activity as up until then my outlook had been primarily shaped by a lot of political reading and my own rather unflinching way of looking at the outer world. Going the other way entirely into a study of beliefs born of the inner world was refreshing and diverting at the time. Spell-casting is something I doubt would be wise for me, too tempting to start looking up destruction incantations to use on people who've pissed me off ;-)
Like yourself, I may end up working it all into a story or novel someday though I have to confess to still having a fair amount of the cynical Boston cop still in me - even though I'm from England ;-)
.Greg.
You've got your witches in England, though, a much longer history of them!
I wouldn't do spells, either. I think it's better to ask for help from wiser forces than I am, because what I want may not necessarily be what I need.
Sort of like Inner and Outer Desire in a character, right?
One thing I know - words conjure. Whether fictionally, building new places, ideas and people. But also non-fictionally, with Orwellian doublespeak. These words are truly evil spells!
Hadn't thought about that way, Alex, but that's an interesting way of looking at it. Outwardly I generally would say I come across as atheistic but there has been more questioning and exploration done inwardly, it's just a side of me I prefer to keep fairly private.
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